This is the ordinary-looking Florida home where two of the bloodthirsty militants who died in Tuesday’s terror attacks began their extraordinary training as flying messengers of death.

Mohamed Atta, 33, and Marwan al-Shehhi, 23, shared a tidy bedroom in Venice for about a week in July 2000, lodging with the bookkeeper for Huffman Aviation, a flight school where they learned to pilot small planes.

More than a year later, with their education complete, each man boarded a flight from Boston with four accomplices apiece and slammed the jetliners into the Twin Towers – stunning those who had crossed their paths.

“They were normal students and worked very hard,” Huffman owner Rudi Dekkers said after turning over the suspects’ files to federal investigators – who have focused on Florida as the home base for many of the suspects.

Details about the recent movements of Atta and his cohorts emerged at a rapid-fire pace yesterday – along with shocking details about the scope of their meticulous planning.

Many of the fanatics involved are linked to the Egyptian wing of terror boss Osama bin Laden’s sprawling network – a melding of World Trade Center bombing mastermind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman’s al Gamaa al Islamia group and the Islamic Jihad movement, sources close to the investigation said.

For months, they prepared for the worst terrorist assault on American soil with remarkable success.

Sources suspect the cells may have been responsible for the theft of American Airlines pilot uniforms from a hotel in Rome several months ago, and they believe its members obtained security passes that allowed them to case airports.

Even more startling, investigators think bin Laden’s network deliberately sent out misleading messages in June that triggered a worldwide terror alert – solely to test the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

Closer to home, there were revelations about the seemingly mundane lives the hijackers led in Florida in recent months.

Twenty-seven suspects trained as pilots. Atta’s efforts, in particular, were ceaseless after he and al-Shehhi turned up in the Sunshine State in 2000 – following studies at Hamburg Technical College in Germany.

After getting his pilot’s license from Huffman, he also attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, spent two days on a Boeing 727 full-motion simulator in December at Opa-Locka Airport near Miami, and practiced out of the Palm Beach Flight Center and Lantana Air in Lantana in recent weeks.

“He came in and he said he wanted to cram in 100 hours in low-winged planes, and the interesting thing is, almost every other time, he brought along another friend,” Lantana operator Owen Gassaway said.

“He insisted on low-wings, and since he was a commercial pilot, it’s quite likely he was training these guys to act as co-pilot – so that they could learn to steer an airplane, how to aim it.”

Palm Beach Flight Center owner Miriam Smith described Atta as taciturn and said the last time she saw him, on Aug. 20, he told her to keep $50 change. The owner of SimCenter Inc. near Miami said Atta and his pals kept to themselves.

“These guys seemed like shy foreigners who were looking for training to give them the ability to get a job in their own country,” Henry George said.

Atta, who lived in a Coral Springs condo complex, was sitting in business-class seat 8D on American Flight 11, the first plane to slice through the World Trade Center, the Boston Globe reported.

Also on Flight 11, according to a Daytona Beach newspaper, was Waleed al-Shehri, who also had logged extensive time in the skies.

He lived in Daytona Beach from 1995 to 1998 and graduated from Embry-Riddle with a bachelor’s degree in 1997.

From there, he moved to Vienna, Va., where he joined eight other Arab men in a makeshift rooming house until he moved out a year ago.

Neighbors said the traffic in and out of the house and the presence of rental cars with New York plates prompted them to call cops – and even the CIA – but nothing ever came of the complaints.

Investigators were also focused on Vero Beach, Fla., where some hijackers trained at the Flight Safety Academy.

The FBI issued a bulletin for a silver 1996 Plymouth and its possible driver, Amer Kamfar. They were also questioning neighbors of Abdulrahman Alomari, who abruptly moved out two weeks ago.